.....For Justice...take a minute to meditate today! SATURDAY Fr. Alfred Delp, S.J., was hanged for high treason in Berlin-Plotzensee at the age of 37. He had been condemned to death only a few months before the end of World War II, after a mock trial presided over by the fanatical priest-hater Roland Freisler. The execution took place just after three o’clock in the afternoon of Feb. 2, 1945. At Hitler’s command, Delp’s ashes were scattered to the winds. There was to be nothing by which to remember him. The best selling book In the Face of Death, a posthumously published collection of Delp’s meditations, notes, journal fragments and letters from his six months of imprisonment, stands alongside Bonhoeffer’s later classic, Letters and Papers From Prison. After the war, Delp’s book suddenly made his name known to a broader public. The small volume was regularly enlarged with newly discovered texts. It went through many editions and came out in paperback in 1958. Translated into French, English and Spanish, the book has become a classic and belongs in the canon of 20th-century spiritual writing. It was one volume of a trilogy whose other parts, Committed to the Earth and The Mighty God, were edited and published later. Thomas Merton judged Delp’s words smuggled out of prison to be perhaps the most insightful Christian meditations of our time. In the Introduction to an American translation that appeared in the 1960’s under the title Prison Writings, Merton did not hesitate to describe Delp as a mystic. More than six months of confinement in Berlin brought about a striking change in his personality, a significant maturing of which one reads with increasing fascination. Solitary confinement, torture, hunger and depression all changed Delp, but they did not break him. He underwent a change not chosen, but forced upon him, a change that especially impresses young people today, and his reflections have become a legacy for future generations. Hitler’s plan for the priest did not succeed . Alfred Delp is not only known today; he still inspires… Remembering the martyr Alfred Delp is a matter of conviction, of knowing that we must keep present before us his way of resistance against a totalitarian regime. What he wrote about new social, inspired by the social encyclicals Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931), could later be found in the basic concerns of labor unions and political parties. Delp thought creatively about the missionary and servant roles of the church and critically about the church’s tendency toward bureaucratic rigidity. His ideas on the future role of religious orders now seem quite modern. Without God, Delp was convinced, we cannot really be human beings. And he would have raised critical questions about today’s generalized religiosity, which has little to do with God. What obligations does Delp’s legacy impose on us? Alfred Delp was not easy to manage. He was an uncomfortable, often non-conforming Jesuit, and in that way, even for his own order, a prophetic figure. His life, at risk of death in his prison cell, has become a legacy. We have more to learn from him than anyone as yet can say. - Fr. Andreas Batlogg, S.J.
Posted on: Sat, 25 Jan 2014 14:13:36 +0000
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